


the potential for photosynthesis

by ethelmuggs



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Coming Out, GAY/LESBIAN SOLIDARITY, Gay Ben Button, Gay Dilton Doiley, Ghosts, Lesbian Ethel Muggs, M/M, TRIED to write this as if it could exist alongside post s3 canon. we'll see, friendship!, mlm/wlw solidarity, uhhhh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:40:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26173609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ethelmuggs/pseuds/ethelmuggs
Summary: She makes a list in her head of events during which you don’t really have the time to mourn your dead best friends: when you think they’ve ascended to be with a pagan god and you’re waiting to join them, when you’re being periodically fed drugs in a cult nunnery, and let’s not forget when you’re escaping a supposedly dead local serial killer! The latter is also the perfect time to realise you’re a lesbian; staring at the boy who’s saving your life and thinking, “Shit. Dilton was right. That hat is fucking stupid.” The high had entirely worn off back then; it might now be time for some withdrawal symptoms.
Relationships: Ben Button/Dilton Doiley, Ethel Muggs & Ben Button, Ethel Muggs & Dilton Doiley, Ethel Muggs & Dilton Doiley & Ben Button
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	the potential for photosynthesis

Ethel thinks everything has its roots, actually. She’s not sure where the vines that hold her feet down find their end, but knows that they are long and tough like a spreading fungus. They might be pink. She hopes they’re pink, that’d be cool. As is the sunrise as it sharpens into day.

This isn’t to say she’s being pulled down, just kept upright. It’s good to be reminded you exist with the occasional tug; a sudden desire to look down at the forest floor, take a step forward, and fall into a concealed trap like from an old movie. For your heart to fly out of your mouth, and to be viciously haunted by how you matter, even if you don’t. Her friends are dead, and no one gives a fuck. She feels loud and clumsy as she twists open the door to the bunker, and wishes she wasn’t going in by choice.

Then, climbing down the ladder, the feeling changes to this kind of careful fragility: a message in a bottle, that says “you’re so safe and I love you so much and please come back”, picked up and tossed back into the sea by some cynical sailor. The smell of dust and saltwater and weed makes her want to cry more than anything else has so far - which is so shitty because she knows she’s going to be all fucking red-eyed at work after walking through the alleyway where everyone smokes and Ben could never make out the smell and all the shitty men will tell her to smile and she will want to scream. The wind carries evil things that are given too much freedom, as do the rivers that run through this town and as does her own bloodstream.

She does cry then, actually, the metal sharp against her spine. It was a long time coming, of course. She’s been away for a long time. When she came home, about three days ago, her dad said, “Ethel, baby, you’ll cry when you need to.”, but it still feels too late. She makes a list in her head of events during which you don’t really have the time to mourn your dead best friends: when you think they’ve ascended to be with a pagan god and you’re waiting to join them, when you’re being periodically fed drugs in a cult nunnery, and let’s not forget when you’re escaping a supposedly dead local serial killer! The latter is also the perfect time to realise you’re a lesbian; staring at the boy who’s saving your life and thinking, “Shit. Dilton was right. That hat _is_ fucking stupid.” The high had entirely worn off back then; it might now be time for some withdrawal symptoms.

She sniffs, and suddenly can’t really move her neck. That’s cool, that’s just a chance to stare at the wall like it’s Summer again and she’s allowed to stare at the wall. She thinks about how she’s not going to prom.

-

The sky is blueing quite slowly, and Ethel can only just see her breath, hanging in the air along with the blossoming birdsong. Did she remember to leave her dad a note so he wouldn’t worry about her being out this early? Yeah. She’s pretty sure she did, anyway. It’s a good, cool Sunday to think about your dead friends and have the sun comfort you.

Her boots grind a few lumps of dry mud to dust. That feels good, too, like some minor expression of anger that she’s started to think she has a right to. She looks at the sky, then around at the trees - mostly slender young maples in this particular area. About a year and a half back, she, Dilton, and Ben had carved their initials on a silver trunk with the screwdriver function of Dilton’s Swiss Army Knife. She can’t forget now that it works a lot better than the actual knife for that purpose, despite Dilton’s contradictions. They were going to come back and watch the tree grow and fatten, their carvings stretching and gaining ever more permanence. Ethel almost laughs; no such luck. She thinks if she found that tree she would cry again, and not stop this time, so she inhales and keeps walking.

The wood pigeon's call sounds uncannily like someone breathing during a panic attack, ragged and hoarse. That’s something she noticed a while ago. It reminds her of sleeping outside.

Potential and permanence and the future are strange, almost non-existent things in the forest. It feels impossible to move forward in a very simple, tragic way. They were fucking good and kind and loving; they were the best friends she was ever going to have so honestly, what _is_ she supposed to do now? Shit. Stay alive. Live carefully. Accept what she cannot change and change what she cannot accept, or whatever.

She can’t fucking accept this, actually - not things being this completely fucking awful. She kind of thinks nothing would be bad ever again if she could hug her friends, though. Not that they hugged much before, at least not in a focused, thoughtful way, where you fit together perfectly. Those Summers were all arms slung over shoulders and cheek kisses and smiles that snagged her skin and left her with even more freckles; the three of them clattered against each other like windchimes. The days ended with scratched ankles and bruised knees, blackberry stained lips and hastily put-together playlists. They were really good. Ben liked all the same music as her.

They were really good, the three of them. Together. In her peripheral, there is a large flat rock, with a couple of struggling poppies pinned beneath it, and a nick in the top left corner. Ethel knows this because she, Ben, and Dilton had put it there, on top of the grave they dug for a dead sparrow two years ago. She knows Dilton would appreciate the winkingly prophetic tragedy of that bird’s tiny skeleton resting just steps away from where his own pulse had sputtered to an end.

She takes those steps looking at the ground, then looks up slowly and there it is: a great, fat trunk swaddled in vines. It’s as trapped as everything else - this is where one of her best friends died and the other tried to and yet she feels debilitatingly safe in a way she’s always wanted, like she’s being lifted up and it’s good because there’s something holding her in place that she can’t quite trust, and she’s rooted in a way that makes her heart swell. In that moment, she does not want to move, and the breeze is light on her arms. I am right here, she thinks, in a way that feels defiant even if it isn’t. I am nowhere else. Staring just past the tree, at the clearing where her friend died, her thoughts arrive with constant clicks like falling dominoes, or the beats of a metronome, fast and clean. I am right here, I am nowhere else, this tree has been here for a very long time, it has been growing for a very long time and now it’s bigger than it was when it started. Something drew us here when they were alive and it’s exactly what drew me here today and I think it might be hope and I’m starting to realise what for but I can’t get the words out. She can’t get the words out; it’s on the tip of her tongue and it comes out like this:

“Where the fuck are you, _asshole!_ ”

Eyelids tight, the faint echo and rustling of leaves hits her like she’s been shoved and something shoots right up to her throat. It’s what she imagines the sensation of a ghost walking through you might be, and in the second it takes her to cough and blink and open her eyes her brain is on high alert: what if it is him, what if he’s back as a ghost or a zombie or something, holy fuck, what if it’s Dilton?

Something sobs; she looks around.

Shockingly enough, the hitherto unidentifiable sound was not, in fact, her dead best friend back to haunt her, but a distressed pigeon, now perched, glaring at Ethel reproachfully, on the stone that marks its cousin’s grave. It tilts its head as if to say, Jesus Christ, you’re a fucking idiot.

Ethel raises her eyebrows, and crouches down to face it, smiling apologetically.

“Hey. Sorry about that. I’ve just got a lot going on. You understand.”

Despite evidently being the easily startled type, it doesn’t move, so she decides she must be doing something right. She nods.

“Right. Um…” Her voice falters as she shifts into a sitting position, “Let me explain myself. It’s just that me and my two best friends used to sort of be in a cult…? Well, it was like a cult-esque board game. I don’t really want to talk about it - I mean, you live around here, you must have seen all that. Guy with antlers? Anyway, they’re both dead now. One of them killed himself here and the other survived but jumped out of a hospital window, and I keep thinking they’ll be back. I keep thinking, like, we would see each other at school and in the Summer, so when I go to school or when it’s Summer then they’ll just have to be there, you know?”

The pigeon gives another hollow sob; it’s always jarring to realise that the noise is nothing more than an acknowledgement, with no sadness in it. It just sounds so sad. Ethel sighs.

“I just keep wondering why I’m here. And, like, why I’ve ever been anywhere. Do pigeons migrate? Or are you in the same place your whole lives? And do you ever think, okay, what the fuck am I doing here? I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t even think about this if I lived somewhere normal.”

She thinks about Ethel in New York, Ethel in Texas, Ethel in fucking Iowa - what’s she up to? She pictures a chevron of wide-winged ginger birds with bows around their heads flying off to Africa and never hitting the top of the sky - it has to remain surreal, an obvious fantasy, otherwise one of two equally bad things will happen: she’ll jinx it and never leave Riverdale, or actually will leave, buoyed by her imaginings. There are roots here, but she’s never understood biology lessons enough to know whether it’s good to drag them away; Dilton would have been able to help.

“Dilton would have been able to help”, she tells the pigeon.

“Yeah, he totally would.”, replies a voice, clipped and sarcastic. It’s not the bird, she knows who it is.

Standing up slowly, Ethel turns around, and sees what she supposes most people wouldn’t expect, but, of course, exactly what she does: Dilton Doiley, wearing nothing but white boxers and cracked glasses, arms crossed as he smiles wryly at her from the middle of the clearing. Then, his expression changes, eyes narrowed, and he takes a tentative step forward. She takes a less than tentative step back. Good things don’t happen here. Good things don’t happen here until they do, which feels more like a threat than anything optimistic.

“Ethel,” he says, slowly, “Can you see me?”

She runs.

-

Well, maybe “runs” is an exaggeration - it’s closer to a fast walk, a jog at a stretch. Any urgency that could have inhabited her brain is being pushed out by a million other things: What the fuck? Again, what the fuck? And, uncomfortably at the forefront, was that, like, a fantasy or something; is she not actually a lesbian and is this seriously how she’s going to realise that, from some weird fucking shirtless hallucination of her dead, and not to mention _gay_ , best friend? There really is no opportunity for any thought to go into her legs working properly.

At the edge of the forest, as the trees become thin and pale again, she stops, and notices that her hands are shaking. Which is fair enough, considering.

Something sort of twists in the top of her head, spinning jerkily like a plate on a stick, and when her vision clears, Dilton is standing there again. He’s closer, now; she can see spots of blood creeping onto his stomach and a bruise around the top of his right eye.

She stares at him. “You died.”

“I got better.”

“Oh my god, I fucking hate you…”

“How can you see me, Ethel?” His voice is controlled; carefully balanced, but he’s never been good at stopping things from bubbling over.

“I don’t fucking know! You died!”, she yells. Neither has she.

“Yeah, I died. I guess. I remember knowing I’d died, and thinking I was gonna, you know…”

Ethel’s mouth is dry. “Ascend...”, she finishes, far too quietly, then clears her throat and tries again. “Ascend.”

“Right, but I didn’t. And then, I was just… I was _here_ , but- but it wasn’t…”

Once his voice has completely trickled away, it’s almost painfully silent. He’s waiting; she knows he is, for all the trees to splinter and sway and crash around them. He’s looking up like he can make that happen, his mouth slightly open, teeth grazing bottom lip. Inhaling, she thinks, yeah, I want to breathe fire too. There’s some kind of residue from before, though - they’re not quite the same anymore. The wind goes right through him and she doesn’t know what dying is like. Ben would know what to say. A leaf flutters towards Dilton’s head. She watches it hit the ground as if he isn’t there, and he looks down, and up, and down again.

“Hey, uh, how- Is... is Ben okay?”

He sounds like a wood pigeon, or sort of like broken glass. It’s in that moment, her breath caught and crystallised and abnormally cold against the roof of her mouth, that Ethel realises she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him cry. Something’s frozen, Ben smiled and threw himself out of a hospital window, and there’s no fucking point in even trying to say anything. He can already see her sad eyes and tongue held behind her teeth and she hates herself for it, and for how she can see him picking at the skin around his fingernails, because Ben would have told him to stop, and would have taken his hand and drawn him close, and it’s not her place. They had always looked so happy together.

“Right. Right. Of course.” he mutters. Maybe he should have known.

She had thought he might have seen him.

“I thought you might have seen him.”

“No.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

“Well, why are you here?”

“I don’t know, Ethel.”

So they’re still the same.

“So we’re still the same.”

Dilton smiles at this, showing his teeth, almost incredulous but genuine and kind and grateful, the way he always smiled when a thunderstorm started.

“God, Muggs, I fucking missed you.”

At the first sound of rain, this kind of release, he used to grin gloriously, like a word-of-mouth storyteller sitting at a campfire, with the glint of it in his eyes, and they would all feel infused with something from the earth’s core as it rattled on the roof of the bunker. Then, actually, she remembers feeling dead and alive and impossible, like water; like rain. Ben liked all the same music as her, and he put things into words. He still does. No one in Riverdale has ever had a knife sharp enough to cut him out. None of them would ever be gone, just maybe stretched out, and a little more transparent than they once were. When you fall, you leave a greater mark than anything else.

Ethel smiles, too.

“Let’s find him.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! i hope ur enjoying this weird niche thing that's written for five people. update: i am never going to finish it tho bc i no longer like it! im still invested in these characters tho and im manifesting dilton and ben ghosts so hard. find me on tumblr @fingersmithbysarahwaters i am writing the worst thing you will ever read


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